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COMMENTARY
Tongue
(Morguefile.com)

The other day, I was flipping through the channels when I ran across the last part of a movie I hadn’t seen in a decade — Liar Liar.

Starring a then-popular Jim Carrey, the movie centered around an attorney whose son’s birthday wish ends up preventing him from lying for a full day. As a result, the main character’s mouth gets him in a lot of amusing trouble.

The movie itself was nothing special for me, but its concept seems to have some relevance in today’s environment. The emergence of Donald Trump as a valid political candidate has been fueled in large part by a message that resonates with a significant number of voters. The Donald has managed to convince people that his shoot-from-the-hip approach to public speaking is better than the “politically correct” way elected officials typically talk to us.

Clichés aggravate but serve a purpose

Most people don’t really care much for political correctness. It can sound condescending at times and often leaves us feeling as if we are being talked down to. Even worse, we can be left with the feeling that a politician’s words are being chosen carefully because the truth is hidden away somewhere in the back office of a high-powered PR firm.

The problem becomes that there is no way to defend political correctness as a consistently positive diversion from the harsh truth. Kevin Durant used political correctness to avoid having to say which way he was leaning regarding his eventual move to Golden State. We all know what we learned the truth to be, despite our feelings that he would never walk away from OKC. It felt as if it would have been better just to know the truth all along.

Politicians are as bad about it as anyone. How many times have we heard those canned speeches in which candidates use the same words and clichés?

  • “I am for the average guy.”
  • “I want to help small businesses.”
  • “I put people before politics.”
  • “I listen to my constituents and that determines how I vote.”
  • “I need more time to reflect on this issue before I comment on it.”

We’ve heard it all before, and to anyone paying attention, it doesn’t sound any different coming from a Republican, a Democrat or an independent. Politically correct candidate statements are usually just empty, hollow words.

Except, they aren’t. They are the words we choose to keep from telling cousin Eddie what we really think about his behavior. Political correctness is what keeps us from telling our boss why he or she is wrong and we are right, even when we are and they aren’t. These are the phrases we all have adopted to keep our lives going with the flow while avoiding opportunities for arguments or discourse that could ruin a perfectly good day.

Staying on the fence, above the fray

Social media can be a great place to practice political correctness.

How many times have you felt the need to reply to someone’s hateful political speech only to wish you had just kept your thoughts to yourself after about 130 replies going back and forth with people you don’t even know?

It happens.

Political correctness allows us to stay on the fence and not really offer an opinion. Or even better, it allows us to avoid saying anything at all. It allows us to be nice when being anything else leads us to feeling bad and needing to apologize.

As we have all discovered, however, there are more than enough people on social media who are all-too willing to offer up their political opinions on as many pages as they can find. And Trump’s campaign has honed in on this wildly outspoken group and appealed to people’s inability to bite their collective tongues when it is socially acceptable to do so. In fact, society practically begs some of these people to clamp down and restrain themselves, which only emboldens their cause.

When in doubt …

I’ve learned not to speak for society in general, but I can occasionally claim to understand what is a better option for people when it comes to speaking their minds. When in doubt, shut it down.

Events of the past month have served as a great example of just that. Regardless of which side of the political fence you find yourself leaning on, hacking into emails is criminal behavior. So, when Trump held a press conference to encourage the DNC’s assumed hackers — Russians — to break into Hillary Clinton’s personal property to locate missing emails, he wasn’t exercising his right to avoid political correctness. He was encouraging a criminal act by another nation.

Whether Trump’s request itself qualified as criminal is beyond my pay grade to determine, but it certainly was something he should have kept to himself. Or at least not spoken aloud in a press conference he scheduled to talk about his response to the hacking announcement.

This wasn’t the first time Trump has said something that exceeded the boundaries of decency, but the bigger concern is that people seem to be enjoying it. They are beaming with curiously content, teeth-sparkling smiles as they talk about how refreshing it is that someone exposes his inner racist or sexist side rather than just being a nice person.

‘When not to wax moronic’

I don’t know about you, but I appreciate it that everyone I meet doesn’t tell me what’s on his or her mind all the time. I don’t need to know a stranger’s entire life story and beliefs. I don’t need my boss to let loose on women and minorities just because political correctness had caused him to keep it to himself. And I certainly want my President knowing when not to wax moronic in front of a foreign leader whose twitchy finger is inches away from the proverbial red button.

Do I like hearing the same clichés from our elected officials? Not really. But sometimes I’m willing to listen to repetition of the same old rhetoric rather than a constant barrage of racist, sexist and childish chatter.

Of course, it probably goes without saying that it’s not politically correct for me to say any of this in the first place.